[Shelagh Delaney's] future career remains the big question-mark in the English theatrical scene; it is quite possible that she will never again live up to the achievement of her first play, A Taste of Honey, and after her second, The Lion in Love, a number of commentators were quite ready to write this off as a freak success. Too ready, perhaps, for despite its obvious weakness and overall inferiority to A Taste of Honey, The Lion in Love does show in certain respects an advance on the first, and may well prove to be a transitional work. (pp. 130-31)

[There] sounds to be little to [A Taste of Honey], and indeed in conventional terms there is little: it has no 'ideas' which can be isolated and considered as such apart from their dramatic context, and if one tries to read the play away from the theatre, without attributing...